Propaganda and complicity permeates our media
— Kazutoki Kono brand director of the Ace Combat series on February 23rd, 2022 as Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine began.
Ace Combat, as most intellectual properties would over the course of nearly 30 years of existence, comes in many forms. From the arcade to home consoles, PC, handheld, mobile and VR. Multiple settings including the real world and an absurdly detailed fictional one lovingly known as the Strangereal. Ace Combat 3: Electroshpere — the Japanese version — tells its futuristic story of humans transcending their bodies through a choice based narrative and visual novel sections crafted by Production I.G.. The second game is a rip-roaring arcade like experience with shredding 80’s guitars and barely a story to speak of. Skies Unknown — the seventh numbered sequel — employs highly detailed and realistic character models ruminating upon freedom as defined by the individual vs the state. War and the weapons we use to wage it, has been eyed with differing perspectives. One game might claim war is only conducted as a tool for the powerful to gain more power. Another taps into jingoist American propaganda popular throughout the early 2000’s targeting Muslim people.
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is not the seventh game in the franchise, it’s the 20th depending on if you consider the original Air Combat arcade machine to be a separate entity from its home console release and the Japanese and international versions of Ace Combat 3 to be different games; I do. It is the 11th title within the Strangereal universe that developers Bandai Namco conceived alongside Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies and have since retrofitted some older titles into. It is a world that often reflects our own in terms of technology and politics, but exists in exaggeration. Because of this separation from reality, the series has been able to comment on real world politics from a safer distance than many other titles coming out of large publishers who place themselves within some variation of our world.
The benefits of the Strangereal setting are something I reflect upon nearly every second of Top Gun: Maverick’s runtime. Top Gun’s influence upon Ace Combat is clear. Specifically, Skies Unknown launched Top Gun licensed plane skins as DLC around the film’s premiere. It’s not as if these two franchises are in direct conversation though. Rather, Ace Combat has taken ques from Top Gun, and both — especially Maverick — are obviously inspired by Star Wars given the shared love for a good ol’ trench run finale that ends with hitting targets roughly the size of a womp rat. But whereas Ace Combat finds itself in a sci-fi middle ground between Star Wars and Top Gun, the latter is placed within our world. Within our conflicts. Even though it does its best to deny such by never naming who it is that Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and his team of crack fighter pilots are actually fighting. All we know is that there is a uranium enrichment plant, and enemy pilots with their faces obscured by helmets who take to the sky in more advanced fighters in order to stop the U.S.’s airstrike. What more do we need to know than that there are dangerous enemies of the United States out there? Who are they? Well, they are simply other.
“We had that great guidance from the first movie — it’s this faceless, nameless bad guy, which is perfect because, again, we didn’t want to make a movie about politics. You can’t really connect it to any real-world enemies. The mirrored, masked pilots also contribute to this feeling of this being a little bit in an alternate reality. That was a fun exercise as a director, to create a non-traceable enemy.” -Director Joseph Kosinski in an interview with the New York Times, linked through Screenrant to avoid the paywall.
Trouble is, it takes but a quick Google search to see that people have done exactly that. There is no Strangereal Top Gun universe. You cannot make the American military apolitical. No government entity can ever exist outside the bounds of politics and to create art and suggest that it is apolitical is to at best be wildly ignorant, and at worst be willfully engaging in the propaganda machine of that political entity.
Mitchell is now decades removed from the time of the original film. He remains a pilot for the Airforce, but now he must find a balance between his “anti-authority” ways and being a teacher for the next generation. The film begins with him as a test pilot for a experimental plane capable of hitting high levels of g-force but ultimately is removed from the project by Ed Harris’ portrayal of a Colonel who tells Mitchell that the time of human pilots is coming to an end. That their world is entering the era of the unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAVs.
There is an interesting reflection of this plot within Skies Unknown. An enemy pilot, known as Mihaly Dumitru Margareta Corneliu Leopold Blanca Karol Aeon Ignatius Raphael Maria Niketas A. Shilage, is an aging in an era where the nation he serves is increasingly relying on UAVs. Mitchell’s struggle is an Americana story though. One of the “blue collar” workers fighting back against automation taking their jobs. All of this on top of a story of an exceptional individual American skillset that, when united with their allies, is capable of overcoming impossible odds against superior enemy forces. A deeply American tale as old as the United States itself.
Mihayl’s story is more in line with Ace Combat’s nuanced themes on freedom and selfhood. Once royalty in a nation swallowed up by Erusea — the major opposing force of the game — Mihaly now serves his conquerors all for the chance to fly. He’s not resisting the arrival of UAVs but embracing the possibility they provide as his body withers. With the help of a scientist also serving Eursea, Mihayl takes to the skies and returns with valuable data with which the AI fueling the UAVs is based upon. Even though his mortal coil will perish one day as a result of old age and high g’s, he will live on in the form of the hundreds of drones which will become the deadliest beings in the sky. The king will never have to relinquish the throne. He will never say goodbye to the deep blue sky, the place he has forsaken all human connection for.
Top Gun: Maverick would frankly, be better served without the Top Gun name. Forgoing the nostalgia, displayed in ways all too familiar to the modern, IP driven Hollywood. Nostalgia is ultimately tied up in yearning for a time that — for many Americans — calls back to a willful delusion where America was a more straightforward good guy. All the while it never quite achieves the cheesy sincerity of the original film, where every other shot seemed to be at sunset. With its sweaty cast in baking in charisma and sex appeal, and musically backed by Berlin’s Take My Breath Away. Maverick has a dearth of such as an “elder” Cruise simply doesn’t have it like he used to and Miles Teller does his best with his bro-y body language during the beach scene, but even that is a corporate nostalgia reference to the volleyball scene of the original. Maverick sorely lacks the cool characters with relationships of brotherhood that have been interpreted as hom*oerotic or openly queer coded. The rival pilot, Hangman, pales in comparison to Val Kilmer’s extremely likable Iceman.
If we’re talking the action scenes, hell yes, Maverick’s dedication to shoving a bunch of Imax grade cameras onto and into real fighter jets does capture a sense of intensity that CG wouldn’t. When the film relies on CG, it is mixed rather well with practical shots, which pushes back on the notion I had that this would be better served leaning into the sci-fi absurdity of Ace Combat. Quite possibly, so much CG could have broken the impressive feat of capturing hundreds of hours of footage of real jets flying a real sky. When it’s at its best, leaning into the astonishment of these machines, Top Gun: Maverick is a capital “C” cool movie. Which is undoubtedly part of the problem. The original Top Gun was a boon for the military with reports that enlistment climbed as recruiters would even be waiting outside of theaters to persuade impressionable audience members riding the theatrical high.
Planes are incredible achievements of mechanical design. The ability to bring thousands of pounds of metal into the sky; there is a good reason the childlike astonishment of it all remains within me. If airshows and the wild success of films like the Top Gun franchise prove anything, many other folks do too. Fighter jets are even more spectacular, letting people race around the sky at speeds the human body strains against — all with a mystifying elegance. The anime fan in me sees the reflection of the mecha genre within the polycarbonate canopies of these machines and surely series like Gundam and Macross exist because and parallel to fighter craft media.
And yet, you know uhhh… fighter jets…kinda terrifying.
These aircraft are largely the creations of capitalist corporations selling to militaries around the world who impose their wills on each other through fiery, metallic violence. Top Gun achieved its spectacle with the explicit help and watchful eye of the American military. Ace Combat pays companies like Lockhead Martin, Boeing, Eurofighter, and others for the rights to the likenesses of their death machines. Undoubtedly, I, and everyone who looks up in dumbfound amazement do so in part of the propaganda. I can’t help but think about the birth of the flight-simulator coming from the US military, or the fact that the US military advertises and streams on Twitch. The usage of Godsmack’s Awake in the US Navy’s recruitment TV ads of the early 2000’s is very much in line with Ace Combat 5’s usage of Puddle of Mudd’s Blurry during trailers and the opening.
As much as I believe that Ace Combat, as a whole, is far better than Top Gun in its sensitivity towards war, it too is culpable in a culture that mythologizes and looks on in astonishment. Skies Unknown is a game that portrays its vaguely United States stand-in of Osea to both wrongfully imprison and force those prisoners into military service. The commander of the penal unit is a self-centered, career ladder climbing cretin who has no trouble acting on his orders to deploy the imprisoned soldiers as fodder for the war machine. But this is the same game that in its final missions units enemies for the greater good, because they’re just so tired of war. It’s true villain just gives up and helps the heroes save the day against his AI creations. It’s naïve in the most idealistic liberal way possible.
I do not doubt the sincerity of Kazutoki Kono’s words as all out war exploded in Ukraine. I do not doubt that he and the team at Project Aces are well aware of many of the criticisms I’ve brought up. There is no clean way of creating these games as they currently stand, with the licensing agreements intact. Should the next game drop the real world planes? Personally, as much as I love the designs of many of the aircraft — the F22 Raptor is the most rad looking vehicle known to mankind — I would get over their lack of inclusion if need be. Project Wingman — a game explicitly inspired by Ace Combat — proves you can still make an incredible Ace Combat without paying war profiteers.
Of course, the rest isn’t so easy. Fighter jets and weapons of mass destruction are always going to be the object of coolness across countless pieces of media, Ace Combat included. That’s… okay. Writing stories that are critical of real world wars and politics and not make any missteps along the way is easier said than done. Even in the midst of Skies Unknown’s chaotic final four missions that have the aforementioned liberal naivete, much of the narrative remains tense and cutting. An entire continent is tossed into a violent chaos that doesn’t discriminate targets, thanks to Erusea and Osea. As its anarchist character Tabloid remarks, the dividing lines of nations are imaginary and do not serve its people. The hellish mission where you’re tasked with crushing a splinter faction of ex-Erusean forces simply defending their homes, which turns out to be Mihaly’s homeland, is filled with guilt. Ace Combat can, and hopefully will still have an edge to it, in whatever form the future of the franchise is.
Top Gun: Maverick cinematographer Claudio Miranda was inspired by an animated short.
A look at the history of the relationship between Hollywood and the US Military.
Patrick Crogan’s Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture.
Top Gun: Maverick had to make alterations in order to play well overseas.
Popular video game engine company, Unity and its ties to the American military.
How the American Military is Using Video Games to Capture the Hearts and Minds of Children.
Playing War: How the Military Uses Video Games.
A great piece on Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere by my buddy, Baxter.
